BYRON IS FREE!

In case you haven’t heard, Byron Sonne, the G20 Defendant who was locked up for over a year without bail, is now Free. Despite the fact that the Crown pretty much destroyed his life and livelihood, he does not have a criminal record, and is now just as free as I am.

The reason I care so much about Byron’s case is the fact that Byron is a hacker and activist, like myself, who decided to poke the dragon. However, in Byron’s case, the Dragon poked back hard. What was at stake in the RvSonne case was nothing more than free thought in Canada, plain and simple. This is why it was critically important for this case to be won the way it was. The fact is that this case will be used as precedent for years to come when it comes to things such as Social Media, Definition of Explosives, grounds for counselling mischief, and other cases. However, the fact remains that the state did cause Byron to go through a divorce and lose his CISSP, and they did keep him in jail for over a year. I honestly hope that Byron keeps up the fight against the state in the courts, and seeks the justice that he deserves.

The effect that the Byron Sonne case has had on Canadian Hackerspaces is also interesting. Unlike the American counterparts, I feel that the Canadian Hackerspaces have moved more against the state and the police because of the G20 and Byron Sonne fiasco. The reason for this is that Byron is one of us, and it could have just as easily been anyone else from Hacklab.to, FOULAB or Vancouver Hack Space facing these charges in court. The old wobbly saying “An injury to one is an injury to all” definitely rings true here, and it’s obvious when you see that.

I look forward to talking to Byron Sonne, because us hackers have to stick together!

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Shouting Matches: Bud Mercer, Public Panels and Capitulation – V2010ISU e-mails

On November 26, 2009, the Impact on Communities Coalition, a group that was talented for riding the fence when it came to the Olympics, organized a forum on the impact the Olympics would have on Civil Liberties in Vancouver. What they managed to do is get Bud Mercer and Steve Sweeney in the same room as people like David Eby from the BCCLA and Alissa Westergard-Thorpe from the Olympic Resistance Network and the 2010 Welcoming Committee. The thing is that during this time, the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit – Joint Intelligence Group was also in the process of spying and harassing activists during this time, and going through everyone’s trash. They also managed to get Bob Cooper, who was with VANOC. This is interesting, since ORN was often excluded from panels because VANOC and the V2010ISU-JGO wouldn’t be on the same panel as ORN.

We know that the event ended with David Eby reading this public letter and walking out, and people heckling Bud Mercer, Steve Sweeney, and the head of the ISU engaging in a shouting match with Garth Mullins and other activists from ORN.

So, the obvious question is how did this happen?

I requested documents, because I believed that Bud Mercer would have been given the intelligence briefs on ORN and all the people who they thought would have been seen at that event. I was at the event and I expected my name to appear there. What I ended up getting were some of the contents of Bud Mercer’s inbox. There’s not a lot of info here, but it should be noted that Alissa was listed simply as an Olympic Critic the entire time her name is mentioned, and she is also not even mentioned on this panel.

It’s interesting that the Community Relations group is involved in this and not the JIG. What’s funny is that Steve Sweeney anticipated that they would be ambushed by ORN and others, and Am Johal also warns against the heckling, so it’s clear that Mercer and Co knew they were going into a hostile room beforehand. That being said, I do think this shows the complete disregard for the JIG intelligence reports.

Of course, the last e-mail is Am Johal apologizing for everyone who was rude to Bud Mercer and Steve Sweeney. Overall, the main thing that is striking is the lack of JIG documents, especially since this is listed as an incident in PRIME and I have a file in the PRIME database that was filed on the same night this happened. I have a feeling that I’ll have to ask Normand about the JIG. As usual, the source file is below. If anyone has video of this night, please contact me and let me know.

5858.PDF – Correspondence about the IOCC panel

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Copies of Completed ATIP Files from Public Safety Canada

I recently asked and received copies of the Completed Access to Information forms from Public Safety Canada:

  • A-2010-00209 – Records concerning a potential border security agreement with the United States, authored between July and December 2010
  • A-2011-00143 – Recommendations following a cyber attack that led Defense Research and Development Canada to shut down one of their servers.
  • A-2011-00220 – All records from March 1 to November 4, 2011 about Canada’s privacy commissioners’ positions on the proposed lawful access bills
  • A-2011-00319 – Emails drafted, sent and received between Feb. 15, 2012 and Feb 21, 2012 regarding the Twitter user VikiLeaks30
  • A-2011-00320 – Emails drafted, sent and received between Feb. 15, 2012 and Feb 21, 2012 regarding the Twitter hashtag #tellviceverything
  • A-2011-00322 – Briefing notes between February 15, 2012 and February 21, 2012 for the Minister on Bill C-30

The first file is the largest and goes through the negotiations for the “Beyond the Border” action plan. I haven’t read through the whole thing yet, but it’s definitely worth the time going through it and finding information in that document regarding the new passports that are supposed to be issued in 2013. (It was supposed to be this year, but I’m guessing budget cuts took care of that).

The second file is a Canadian “Cyber War” document which talks about how Public Safety Canada is the lead agency when it comes to Canada’s Cyber Warfare strategy. This should frighten people since these idiots can’t operate a can opener. However, there’s a nice set of slides by DND which talks about what they think “Cyber War” is. It’s amazing how much effort can put into a term that was made up as a part of SCIENCE FICTION. I definitely want to get a shirt that says “I’m a part of Red Force” or “FUCK BLUE FORCE”. I think the presentation is far more interesting than anything else, since it shows what the DND, CSEC and Public Safety Canada is currently thinking about “Cyberwar” and how they won’t let reality get in their way.

The third document is interesting, since it indicates that Public Safety Canada was present in Victoria for the 2011 Privacy and Security Conference where Lawful Access was being discussed. There’s also the letters by the Privacy Commissioner and others with the footnotes by a burecrat in the Government of Canada where they immediately try to discredit the Commissioner. I have no idea if this is before it even makes it to the Minister or not. Then there are the concerns of every other privacy commissioner in Canada with respect to the Lawful Access legislation. It also shows Public Safety, the RCMP and others reading Michael Geist and Jesse Brown’s blog entries on Lawful Access.

In addition to this, they also look at the Twitter subpoena case (which has now got its own entry into Wikipedia due to its importance), which clearly influenced Bill C-30 and the updates to PIPEDA when they added the Gag Order clause. There’s also back and forth between the policy analysts at the Privacy Commissioner’s office and Public Safety Canada. Given the general high regard I hold for the Privacy Commissioner, and the extremely low regard I hold to Public Safety, it’s really interesting since the e-mails seem very passive-aggressive in a polite-sort-of-way. Despite everything that has happened, it is disturbing seeing Public Safety Canada treat the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as an enemy threat, but there you have it. That being said, Public Safety Canada isn’t very big on fundamental human rights, or laws such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or actually giving a shit about the public’s safety when it doesn’t help their objectives.

The fourth document is about Vikileaks, and also has a mention of Occupy Vancouver protesting the Minister’s visit to Richmond. Unfortunately, I was at the protest, and the protest was so small that I was actually able to social engineer my way to the RCMP Security Detail inside the River Rock Casino, which tells me that the protest wasn’t viewed as any sort of threat to Mr. Toews, and that it was easily ignored. However, it’s good to know that the mention of Occupy did cause someone at Public Safety Canada to worry, which says something for the Occupy Movement as a whole, even if the numbers aren’t there all the time. The document also provides a list of tweets that Public Safety Canada sampled. It might be a worthwhile exercise to see if you’re mentioned there.

The fifth document is more of the same. The staff people at the ministry are surprised at the backlash, mostly because they don’t see anything wrong with Canadians being spied on.

The last document are briefing notes with the Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu, which indicate that our friendly local fascists at the Vancouver Police Department are all too keen to spy on your communications. The briefing notes also contain Chu’s biography. Of course, I don’t have to mention the fact that the VPD was caught downloading pr0n on their computers, or the fact that the Chu himself wasn’t going to bat for this bullshit piece of legislation, letting his Deputy Chief take the heat for it. That’s all on the public record if you go to their streaming page.

The links to the files are available above. I hope to have more info on Lawful Access soon, but I think it’ll be more of the same, to be honest.

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Happy May Day Comrade, We’ve been spied on – Open Source Surveillance by the G20ISU-JIG

Open Source in intelligence circles refers to things that are volunteered on the Internet. This includes blog posts such as this one, news stories like what has been featured on the Media Coop website, things posted on ainfos, Twitter, Facebook and anything else that can be found on the internet. The Open Source surveillance can then be used by the JIG to pick their targets. For example, the Open Source work done on the Victoria Anarchist Bookfair caused myself and other vendors from Vancouver and Victoria to be singled out and targeted. The same thing appears to be true with the G8 and G20 activists.

The request I made ended up netting me a vast amount of PDF data. The majority of the data consists of various postings from websites, but there is one extremely large 1000 page file that shows header files and summaries of every site that they visited. What’s interesting to note is that the intelligence gathering didn’t stop after the G20 but went after and covered other activities of the targeted groups. The groups that I requested information on included the following:

  • Toronto Community Mobilization Network
  • Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance
  • No One Is Illegal
  • Common Cause Ontario
  • Media Coop
  • Convergence des Luttes Anticapitalistes (CLAC)
  • Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair (run by Common Cause)
  • Upping the Anti (because apparently copies of it are used as weapons)

I remember getting the call from Normand Sirois when he told me that I accidentally requested the whole G8/G20ISU-JIG database, and I wasn’t expecting to get anything back, however it seems like I got a lot more than I thought I’d get. What I do notice is once again they’re using Facebook to gather the intelligence, but unfortunately the Facebook UI from 2010 doesn’t expose their username. However, I can see that this isn’t a dummy account and that the analyst who is gathering the info is getting game requests for Zoo World and Wily’s Sweet Shop, which tells me this is someone’s personal account, unlike “Freedom Song” of the V2010ISU-JIG. So, if you feel like doing some investigating, you can probably find the Facebook users who viewed these events.

The targeting of legal defence is rather interesting, since this indicates that the RCMP view prisoner support to be something to be stomped out as well as legal preparations prior to the G20.

The wide range of Open Source Intelligence is insane, and one of the earliest pieces of intel they pull is an old article from old no2010.com, which discussed APEC. There’s also evidence that the RCMP targeted the Exile Infoshop in Ottawa, which would be of no surprise given how V2010ISU targeted both Spartacus and Camas. (Side note: It would be an interesting exercise for infoshops to seek legal counsel in Canada, similar to how Long Haul sued the FBI when their equipment was seized and not returned. I would be down with helping with such a venture, since this chill does mess with a store’s survival.)

At any rate, these files aren’t exactly high quality material, but there’s enough leads from them that I can send in more requests of who was spied on and why, similar to what I’ve been doing with the V2010ISU-JIG. The main difference is that I don’t know what to request for the G20 because I live in BC and not Ontario or Quebec and wasn’t at the G20. Here is the archive of the whole file package. There’s a tarball and a zip below:

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Keeping Score: ATIP lists for Feb/March 2012

So, tonight I wrote up more ATIP requests based on the lists provided by the Government of Canada. I know that I can search them through an web tool, but I enjoy reading them because it helps me keep score.

CSIS: Major Victory in March 2012

I have five responses from CSIS in March 2012. A-2011-079, A-2011-082, A-2011-114, A-2011-151 and A-2011-152 are all mine. I can see the Globe and Mail’s version of 151 below as A-2011-184, and I can see that I got more pages by providing a timeframe for my request. Overall, with the Wikileaks Task Force e-mails and the ITAC threat assessments, March was pretty epic win as far as getting info out of CSIS.

RCMP: I am not alone

The RCMP requests behind, but I don’t blame them since they have a massive volume of requests to send out. A-2011-04382, A-2011-06120 and A-2012-00258 are my requests, so I lost out on that one. But I do notice more requests about the V2010ISU-JIG, namely about the COT and the Undercover Teams. It may help that person if they read the AAR that indicates what teams the JIG has.

Public Safety Canada

I’m quickly starting to send more ATIPs their way than I am with the RCMP, CSIS and the CBSA. The Lawful Access debacle is why a ton of people are requesting information to see what happened with the process. I know that my request is in PCO hell where they’re trying to massage the request so that it’s useless to anyone, however it seems that others got their Lawful Access responses. I did get a CCIRC response, which is A-2011-00266, but there’s not a whole heck of a lot to report on this one, but Public Safety still hasn’t given me all the info I really want from them.

I took a break from the blog and from ATIP, mostly because I wanted to do something that wasn’t going to make me super depressed with the fact that the Government is really trying to make our lives worse in the name of safety and security, but this week I was able to get caught up a bit. Hopefully we can uncover more issues and shed light in dark corners, even if the Conservatives are trying to obfuscate everything.

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CSIS Leaks – Adil Charkaoui and La Presse

Sometimes I ask random questions of agencies such as CSIS, like ones about the procedure involving leaked information. This was done after CSIS leaked infomration about Abdelrazik so that they could try and wreck his court case. It seems that there was a leak in relation to Adil Charkaoui in 2008 to La Presse. The case went to a Federal Court judge who demanded to know who the source of the leaks were, and there’s an article by the Ottawa Citizen.

This has the information about the leak, as well as the official media lines from the leak. Of course, I was looking for the leak that caused Jason Kenney to be a douchebag, but I didn’t get any information on that leak. However, the leak did hurt Charkaoui’s case back in 2008 and it seems that the court doesn’t like it when the rights of individuals are violated by the Government of Canada leaking information to the press.

At any rate, here are the documents. I apologize about the disjointed nature of this CSIS document, but hopefully we will get something more substantial soon.

csis_leaks.pdf – 3.5 MB – SHA1SUM: 2e37652c972500e002859da62cd38393bd83bbdf

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Notes from CSIS about the WikiLeaks Task Force

In the past I have received documents from the DND about the Wikileaks Task Force, and from DFAIT themselves. This time, I have the documents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). These documents are very similar to the earlier documents and have information about the US Diplomatic Cables that Wikileaks published years ago. It seems that CSIS set up an intelligence assessment branch to work with the WTF to go through these documents.

There is mention about the CSIS/Judd cable, followed by an e-mail from someone at CSIS who is sending more CSIS staff over to DFAIT to help with the Wikileaks Task Force. Apparently there was an offer of CSIS to have their own dump of the cables, since Wikileaks was blocked to the Government of Canada. There’s documents where they try to determine when “Canada Day” is, namely when the documents are going to be dumped for Canada, but this is something that we’ve seen before.

Overall, CSIS was just as eager to see the documents on Canada as everyone else and was disappointed when they didn’t see anything. Of course,the major windfall happened on April 28, 2011, right before the election happened. At the end it really came down to what it normally comes down to in Canada, the opinion of the world on the Alberta Tar Sands.

I apologize for this release kind of being a turd. The other response I got about leaks from CSIS is a bit more interesting. That will be a subject of another blog post.

csis_wikileaks.pdf – 24 MB – SHA1SUM: 7375412f99ebdb180b7573564cc506b09dd9289b

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#OccupyCanada, Anonymous and the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre

Last year, I requested documents about the #Occupy movement in Canada, as well as documents on Anonymous from the CSIS Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre. This was to determine whether CSIS was monitoring Anonymous or the various Occupy encampments that were in Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal. It seems that they were monitoring it, but there doesn’t appear to be much here that they couldn’t find on the Internet.

We’ve had files from ITAC before about the Olympics and the G20, so it made sense to start there. The change in language from “Threat” to “Terrorism” implies that Canada considers the Occupy movement and Anonymous terrorist groups, since why else would a Terrorism Assessment Centre have documents about them.

The Occupy documents first start with the first notice regarding the call-out. It should be noted that this call-out was based on “Open Source” intelligence, which means they saw it on the Internet just like everyone else. Then there’s this weird almost totally unrelated document about Muslims Against Crusades demonstrating on Rememberance Day. This follows with the old Anonymous video that threatened Rob Ford if OccupyToronto was evicted.

The final report is about the Occupy The Port protest that happened back in December. What’s interesting is the fact that the RCMP is telling ITAC about the fractured nature of “OccupyVancouver”, which implies that the RCMP themselves have been also monitoring OccupyVancouver and in fact this may have been part of an Occupy Joint Intelligence Group. I have already sent a request to the RCMP asking for info on the Occupy JIG, but I haven’t heard anything about it yet.

The Anonymous one is shorter, but a bit more interesting. It first refers to an operation called Operation Green Rights as a threat to the Oil Sands. It also talks about nuisance activities during Guy Fawkes Day, known as Operation Injustice Awareness, the earlier mentioned Toronto video, as well as an Anarchist call-out against Stephen Harper.

This report mentions No One Is Illegal, NOWAR-PAIX and Convergence des luttes anti-capitalistes (CLAC), and draws on the previous intelligence gathered by the G8-G20ISU-JIG. Apparently there was in invite to Anons and a website filestack.ca that just has a picture of a person wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, and says the usual Anonymous motto “We Are Legion, We Do Not Forgive, We Do Not Forget, Expect Us”.

It should be noted that much of this information was redacted or outright withheld by CSIS due to numerous exemptions under the Access to Information Act, however we can gain some information from this, namely that the RCMP were in fact spying on Occupy just like they spied on the G20 Defendants, and Anti-Olympic Activists in the past.

Here are the files:

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The Surveillance against Camas and Spartacus

The Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit early on did surveillance of Spartacus Books. It had the old address before the fire. We can see this get updated, and the V2010ISU made sure to grab the old ALF and ELF material that the store had. It’s interesting to see what they said about Spartacus Books, namely that it wasn’t a target because of the longevity of the store, but they still treated it as such anyway. Apparently someone advised against bugging the store, which I found rather interesting. Therefore, the majority of the surveillance of the bookstore was outside it.

What is interesting with this document is how I managed to get on the radar. It appears that the Victoria Anarchist Bookfair in 2008 was where they got their target list. They singled out the Vancouver and Victoria based vendors, and they show the various bookstores they visited, which included Dark Horse Books. It seems that the CBSA was involved with the V2010ISU-JIG early on with the Intelligence Officer Kelly Sandhu actively participating in the activities of the JIG. Also, it seems that the Victoria Kool Aid society knew about the JIG investigating, since the RCMP and CBSA got a tour of the venue before the bookfair occurred.

Also, the documents about Camas confirm that the first photo of me from 2008 was taken by IO Sandu, and that they were set up outside the bookfair and seeing who was going in and out of the bookfair. Later, one of the members of ISU decides to buy some zines from Camas for intelligence purposes. It seems that the CBSA was very involved in the surveillance of NO 2010 Victoria. Unfortunately, the records on Camas are incomplete.

Spartacus, on the other hand, due to my involvement has far more information. It seems that IO Sandu visited Spartacus Books. This was back in 2007 at the old 319 West Hastings location. Following this, the JIG decided to do impromptu visits of the bookstore. It seems that the surveillance of the old store was cut off on February 2008. It seems that later in 2008, the JIG took pictures of people who they believed were part of the Spartacus Collective and kept track of them.

After that, there is the lengthy file on my activities which are boring. They decide that I’m an APC member, despite the fact that I’ve never attended a meeting. They follow me around to Coffee Shops, take video of me going to lunch with co-workers, and even follow me into 7-11. There are other interesting facts in this, namely the fact that Special O spied on the ORN meeting that happened on June 9th at Spartacus.

There are other documents which indicate that there was video of meetings that the JIG concluded supported Black Bloc Anarchists. I’m going to have to go through the list archives and see if I can find information regarding these meetings to see what was actually surveilled. I’m also going to look into obtaining the video, since it is video taken in a public place, there shouldn’t be any redactions. That being said, it does reveal who else they were watching.

In short, the tactics of the V2010ISU-JIG were designed to try and use the community infrastructure that was set up against us. The dangers of organizing in the open should not be underestimated, since it means that the people doing the above-ground organizing have to be doing it twenty-four hours a day. Wherever they go, whatever they do, they’ll be under surveillance by Special O, INSET, the JIG or other agencies who work to criminalize dissent.

As usual, here are the documents.

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In Solidarity with Byron Sonne…Security Culture: A Handbook for Activists

Byron Sonne’s case is wrapping up, and he’s currently being accused with counselling mischief not committed because he was advocating that people read this zine. Because Censorship is bullshit, I’m going to discuss this book in detail, and explain what this book is about.

The original zine was written as part of the tao security site. The tao collective is a small tech collective based in Toronto, and they offer technical services to groups who work towards social justice. One of the things that tao used to maintain was the tao security site, which was later taken over by the Resist Collective when they split off from Tao and it became the Resist security site. I don’t know for certain who maintained this site, but given the fact that later Resist! would go and support a state collaborator and then make excuses, the hard line in these documents needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

The document itself is extremely old, and is dated. It refers to APEC and the practices of the RCMP and CSIS at these times. Unfortunately, nobody updated these documents in 2003, since that would have been a far better primer for the current Integrated Security Unit/Joint Intelligence Group reality that we currently face. However, there is good discussion about Security Culture and how it can exist in large social movements.

There are some things that stick out, such as the fact that it indicates that the RCMP have to inform the target that they were being listened in on 90 days after the fact. I have no idea whether this is real or not, and it would be good to follow up on it. It also makes other unverifiable claims, such as whether Special “I” can break into people’s homes or not. I still have to investigate whether people found a listening device in their homes, and what they did with the listening device.

It is right about the counter-insurgency model, except that it has been further refined into five phases, instead of just the simple three. In short, when you look at the document, it is very similar to the content on paroxysms.ca. Does that mean that I am counselling mischief by documenting RCMP and CSIS tactics, and using militant language? So far, I don’t believe so.

What’s interesting is that the security site had more information than just the basic information. I don’t want to post it because I feel a lot of it may be outdated or misleading, and that’s the last thing that I’d want. This pamphlet, on the other hand, is pretty accurate information, and despite its dubious origin, is worth the read.

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